Side note; what does a self described chemist do these days? Seems like Breaking Bad spurred a lot of interest in the field, but as someone who minored in chemistry many years ago, the actual job prospects seemed limited. And research seemed very stodgy (to me at least). If you don't mind sharing, what's your background and what types of things are you working on?
Chemists do the same things they always have, just for much less money than the same people would make today in software engineering. Here are some types of applied chemistry:
- Deciding what ratio to mix things in for the countless liquid products that are combinations of already-discovered chemicals. Everything at the grocery store that comes in a jug or a bottle (cleaning products, hair conditioner, drain cleaner) falls in to this category.
- Doing industrial research to improve existing processes. This would include discovering new catalysts, and trying out the endless permutations of solvents and conditions in which existing reactions take place, to optimize them for whatever the biggest operating costs are.
- Figuring out how to recycle industrial chemicals and get the valuable stuff back out of sludge and effluent. This is a surprisingly big field with important consequences.
- Working on specialty materials, like plastics and synthetic rubbers, that are not completely dissimilar from existing products but require a chemist to design them for specific, demanding applications.
The fact that everything involving the physical world gets you paid way less for work that's way more difficult than programming will come back to bite us somehow, but it's hard to say when.
> for work that's way more difficult than programming
That just reads as “I am better than you”.
Programming is arbitrarily difficult, and it rarely has an objective reality to measure against. I have some kind of “Peter Principle” in mind where people continuously reach their own personal limits of complexity. However they then expand their skills in an ill-defined problem space to level up and beat their prior limits. Programmers display a massive variety of talent, and most of the talent is invisible because the problem space is heinously deeply complex and outside observers only see glimmers on the surface.
Or is your implication that idiots and/or lazy people choose to be programmers? Certainly there is a share of them in the discipline too: perhaps smart for chasing money and perhaps even content with the challenges they face personally.
Regardless, you are being very judgmental towards programming.
Your own descriptions of your discipline could be perceived as rote work or make work, on the same level as making another CRUD app for a business, that doesn’t require deep applied intelligence. How people apply their skills and intellect to the problem defines how hard the problem is.
I personally have experienced the more-money-less-difficulty science-to-coding gradient. You can say that programming can be arbitrarily difficult, which is true, the reality is that it usually isn't arbitrarily difficult, and corporations are happy to pay non-geniuses lots and lots of money to reliably design systems that work with zero marginal cost, whereas if you want to make $160k as a ground-level researcher, making 1% improvements to products with very substantial marginal costs, using million-dollar equipment to do your job, you'd have to be a rare intellect indeed, and beyond that be great at selling your own value.
In software, there's no such thing as marginal cost, the only tool you need is a $300 laptop, and all you need to know can be read for free online. That's an amazing world, from an economic standpoint, and it's no surprise at all that it's so much easier to make money that way.
I'm not a chemist. (Worse, I'm a physicist). But I have several relatives who are chemists. And I work for chemists. I think there's an issue right now, which is that market demand for computer programmers has created a distorted view of all other occupations. That's not going away any time soon, and if it does, there will be some other "hot" occupation.
I think what makes people want to become natural scientists is a genuine interest in how things work, plus either an innate or learned ability to "think" in a certain way that works for their field of study. I don't have a good way to describe it, but a sense that a chemist thinks like a chemist. A scientist is obsessed with learning how things work. The different fields are different approaches to finding that out, that work for their respective domains. Trying to figure out how a frog works by thinking like a physicist will result in a lot of dead frogs.
The other post mentions food science. Stodgy, yes. Fascinating, you bet. Food isn't going away. The problems of making food abundant, pure, healthy, safe, and ecological, are going to get more and more challenging. It can be stodgy because we have to control our impulse to try dangerous experiments on human subjects, or make a mistake that brings down a production line or triggers a recall. But oddly enough there are people who get their excitement out of working within that constrained environment.
You have to embrace the stodge. Something I've noticed about chemists, is that they tend to have the best discipline about running controlled, repeatable experiments. They keep the best notebooks.
Chemistry is closely related to materials science. Any realistic development of a material beyond the basic research phase will require the involvement of a chemist. Likewise drug manufacturing, etc.
I don't think Chemistry in and of itself is a thing, or was it ever. It always has to be applied to something, and then the possibilities are endless. After all, everything is made of chemicals, isn't it? Personally, I'm in food, I also have an MSc in Food Engineering, and currently preparing to start a PhD in that area (NIR spectroscopy, Hyperspectral Image Analysis). But there is also the oil, pharma, bio, environmental, etc. areas. (Also, in British English "Chemist" means "Pharmacist". I always wondered, what they called a Chemist?)
> Also, in British English "Chemist" means "Pharmacist". I always wondered, what they called a Chemist?
(Brit here). A shop that sells pharma products is often colloquially called 'a chemists' but the people who work there are typically referred to as pharmacists. 'Chemistry' as studied at school and Uni is totally about chemicals in general and not drugs (which would be pharmacology). Someone who described themselves as a chemistry student or professor would almost inevitably be perceived as someone who is working with chemicals.
Most jobs in industry are in quality control for medicines, food, paint, cleaning products, etc. Most industries need at least one chemist to analyse input and output to your processes. Then you have academia/teaching.
Myself, I'm about to finish my PhD in materials science and discover what I can really pivot to, wether related to materials/chemistry or using what I've learned about data analysis for any other area.
